JON REES: £100m bung may help us love fracking

Despite the protests fracking isn’t even on the cards at Balcombe, West Sussex. Energy firm Cuadrilla plans to test drill for oil, not frack for gas.

However, the new move by the Local Government Association may yet change a few minds.

The LGA last week said that the councils it represents want 10 per cent of revenues from any gas extracted through fracking in their area.
This is considerably more than the paltry £100,000 cash bung and the 1 per cent of revenues currently on offer to councils as part of the Government’s incentive programme.

Anti-fracking: An activist near the entrance to the Cuadrilla exploratory drilling site in Balcombe, West Sussex

Councils are right to press for a better deal. Energy firms offer similar sums in other parts of the world and the UK should be no different.

The Crown’s ownership of petroleum rights means that there is currently little upside to fracking for British landowners, unlike in the US where overnight millionaires have been created by the fracking revolution.

Any onshore fracking here is a long way off. But the envisaged returns of up to £100million for a local community could alter the tone of the debate considerably.

Bondholders pay the price for Co-op's misguided Britannia takeover

As poor decisions go, it’s right up there. The Co-operative Bank’s takeover of Britannia Building Society in 2009 meant it inherited not a burgeoning number of solvent borrowers, but an array of losses on dodgy loans.

We reveal the scale of those losses today.
Now the Co-op Bank must raise £1.5billion to meet new conditions imposed by chastened regulators.

It is the bank’s bondholders who must bear much of the cost, 7,000 of whom are ordinary people, many of them pensioners.
The bank will reveal just how high a price they must pay later in the year, but the admirable Co-operative ethos is looking ever more tarnished.

Government's July borrowing a worry

We're all a bit strapped for cash after the holidays, but the news that the Government had to borrow to cover a spending shortfall this summer shows George Osborne has let the sun go to his head.

For the first time in three years the Government spent more than it raised in July.
It is usually a prosperous month, partly because much corporation tax and self-assessment tax comes in then.

This time, Government spending rose faster than tax receipts, leading to a £62million deficit for the month. Last year saw an £823million surplus.
Other indicators are going up.

Stamp duty receipts on house sales were up 25 per cent in the quarter to July. But that is an insubstantial basis on which to build an economic recovery.